07 A Convergence of Major Trends
Collaborative solutions development is at a convergence point for several large scale economic, technology and organizational trends currently operating in the world today. These include:
- The accelerating “process orientation” in business, because collaborative process development is a major element of collaborative solutions development;
- The unsolved and increasingly impactful issue of business/IT alignment;
- Accelerating competitiveness driven by innovation, which is in turn highly dependent on collaborative solutions development;
- The “skills crunch”, which has a major focus on knowledge workers with skills in collaborative solutions development;
- Globalization and the need to communicate process knowledge across languages, cultures and areas of expertise;
- Outsourcing and “network” organizations, which make intense use of collaborative solutions development;
- Environmental economics, which depend on understanding how business, environmental and social processes interact;
- Knowledge mining, in terms of capability to capture, access and re-use process knowledge;
- SOA capability, which allows processes to interact more generally;
- Web 2.0 / Social Web communications and information combining, which will increasingly include process information;
- Standard protocols for communication and interaction, which will drive development of standard interfaces for working with processes;
So while collaborative solutions development is already important, it will continue to increase in importance for the foreseeable future.